To Our Stakeholders,

Of all of the things that NVIDIA has built, I'm most proud of our culture of giving.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

More than supporting worthy causes, it's a culture where employees give their best, offer their ideas and share their experiences — especially those lessons learned in failure. A high-performance, creative, collaborative work environment fundamentally starts from a culture of giving. We believe that success and sacrifice come from the same powerful source.

With this in mind, I am very pleased to introduce our 2011 Global Citizenship Report. It highlights our commitment to make a contribution to society and a difference in the world.

We start with our technologies. GPUs are the engines of visual computing, the art and science of using computers to generate or manipulate imagery. The technologies that power the creation and enjoyment of fantastic games and animated movies can also give doctors real-time insight into human health and disease.

Our GPUs are energy efficient by design. Our engineers are ingrained with a passion to continuously strive for performance with ever greater efficiency so end-users can do more with less. One of our major inventions is CUDA, a breakthrough in parallel processing which has led to an order-of-magnitude jump in performance efficiency.

In our operations, we strive to lighten our environmental footprint. With a philosophy of “no waste” — whether of time, human effort, or materials — our efforts have resulted in sending less waste to landfills and using less energy to run our offices and data centers. And we benefit too, as our financial performance continues to improve. Last year, we achieved the highest gross margins in our history. Beyond our walls, we actively work with our supply chain partners to identify areas of improvement, from materials to labor practices.

NVIDIANs bring our culture of giving to life. This past year, in 18 offices around the world, including China, India, and Germany, our employees and their families organized projects to help their local communities. With funds that would have been spent on holiday parties, NVIDIANs have improved schools, rebuilt parks, adopted orphanages, brought cheer to elderly and child cancer patients, and contributed scholarships to schools for the blind. We call this global effort Project Inspire, as it has surely inspired a spirit of giving in all of us.

Last year, we published our first global citizenship report. This year, we’ve enhanced the report with examples highlighting how our technologies are helping to solve some of the most challenging global issues.